I really wanted to attend the Israeli-American Council’s (IAC) conference this year, as I often do, but family obligations kept me in Los Angeles.
As luck would have it, I got a little taste of the IAC on the Santa Monica Pier.
Let me explain. One of the many things I’ve enjoyed about the IAC is what my friend Adam Milstein has called the spirit of “Israeliness” they have brought to American Jewry.
I tasted that spirit when my friend and I bumped into a young Israeli couple while watching a heavenly sunset from the Santa Monica Pier.
They were on a mission in the diaspora to help injured soldiers. The young man, a Moroccan Israeli with a ready smile, had caught four bullets defending Kibbutz Beeri on Oct. 7. After recuperating, he went straight to fight in Gaza. His girlfriend was also in the IDF and told her own stories.
Their tone was matter of fact. No drama. Just two Israelis doing what they must do to defend their country. And they both seemed quite happy to be alive.
At one point, the woman asked why there was so much antisemitism in America. It’s the way she asked that caught my attention. She wasn’t naïve; she was perplexed, as if she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to hate Jews or Israel. The war in Gaza? She made sure to tell us how her commanders would “drive us crazy” about limiting civilian casualties.
We wanted to answer her question, so my friend and I dutifully started sharing the litany of explanations for antisemitism, which by now I can recite like an AI Bot.
Then I stopped. Maybe I was just tired of repeating the same old stuff and figured that this young Israeli couple needed to hear something different.
“You’re right to be surprised that people hate Jews,” I told her. “You should be surprised. Never stop being surprised. Hating Jews is stupid.”
When I got home that night, I couldn’t get the word “stupid” out of my mind.
We rarely think of using “stupid” to describe antisemitism. It’s too lowbrow, and it doesn’t have the drama of “evil,” “hateful,” “racist” and “unacceptable.” These words carry the gravitas of morality.
Stupid carries the gravitas of a schoolyard rumble.
“A stupid person,” according to a dictionary definition, “goes through life making decisions that seem to lack all common sense.”
That’s it: no common sense. Those Israelis we met were full of common sense, and common sense suggests that only a stupid person would decide to hate Jews. After all, it should be stupid to hate people who have done so much for America and the world, and a country like Israel that has brought countless innovations to help humanity.
But words like “stupid” don’t enter our vocabulary because we’re too busy trying to understand our haters. Why do they hate us? Are they antisemites or antizionists, and how are those different? Are they from the left or right, and which is more dangerous? The questions are endless.
Whether it’s from skinheads or kaffiyeh-wearing fanatics or leftist Israel-haters, all Jew-hatred has one thing in common: it’s stupid.
Yes, it’s also dangerous and we must defend ourselves. But one way we can take the initiative is to humiliate the haters, something we rarely do.
“Stupid” conveys instantly the ridicule and contempt Jew-haters merit. It tells them they don’t even deserve an argument.
It’s well-known that the hate that starts with Jews never ends with Jews. History has shown that Jew-hatred is typically followed by decline and instability in the societies that have harbored the hatred.
Hating Jews, in other words, is suicidal, which makes it even more stupid.
I’m not suggesting we should stop analyzing why people hate us. Jews will never stop trying to understand. It’s who we are.
But while we’re at it, let’s also try to understand why we’ve had so little impact on Jew-haters. They brazenly brand us as genocidal murderers, while we accuse them of being Jew-haters, as if that will hurt their feelings.
Rather than letting them brand us with lies, isn’t it time we brand them with a truth that stings?
“Anti-Semites are Pro-Stupid” is my entry for the next Jewish activist T-shirt. I have a feeling that Israeli couple we met during the heavenly sunset would totally get it.
